Abstract
Abstract. The Barents Sea, located between the Norwegian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, is one of the main pathways of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Changes in the water mass transformations in the Barents Sea potentially affect the thermohaline circulation through the alteration of the dense water formation process. In order to investigate such changes, we present here a seasonal atlas of the Barents Sea including both temperature and salinity for the period 1965–2016. The atlas is built as a compilation of datasets from the World Ocean Database, the Polar Branch of the Russian Federal Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography and the Norwegian Polar Institute using the Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis (DIVA) tool. DIVA allows for a minimization of the expected error with respect to the true field. The atlas is used to provide a volumetric analysis of water mass characteristics and an estimation of the ocean heat and freshwater contents. The results show a recent “Atlantification” of the Barents Sea, that is a general increase in both temperature and salinity, while its density remains stable. The atlas is made freely accessible as user-friendly NetCDF files to encourage further research in the Barents Sea physics (https://doi.org/10.21335/NMDC-2058021735, Watelet et al., 2020).
Highlights
The Barents Sea shelf is a “hotspot” in the ongoing, rapid climatic changes taking place in the Arctic (Lind et al, 2018)
The results show a recent “Atlantification” of the Barents Sea, that is a general increase in both temperature and salinity, while its density remains stable
As the northern limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and a source for dense Arctic Intermediate Water (Schauer et al, 1997), changes to the water mass transformation processes in the Barents Sea affect the thermohaline circulation of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans (Swift et al, 1983; Kuhlbrodt et al, 2009; Mauritzen et al, 2013; Lozier et al, 2019)
Summary
The Barents Sea shelf is a “hotspot” in the ongoing, rapid climatic changes taking place in the Arctic (Lind et al, 2018). Using AVHRR data, Comiso and Hall (2014) found the northern Barents Sea to be one of the areas within the Arctic that shows the highest temperature increase for the period 1981– 2012. They found a significant decline in sea-ice cover between the two periods 1979–1995 and 1996–2012. In situ data often have disadvantages of a limited coverage in space (e.g., repeated hydrographic sections) and/or time (e.g., ship surveys) Providing these observations on a regular grid is desirable in order to examine spatiotemporal changes. We provide the dataset including fields of expected error, and we present two examples of usage where this gridded dataset has an advantage over the non-gridded raw data: volumetric analysis
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